The present invention relates to a method of detecting change using an image. More specifically, the present invention pertains to a method of detecting change in an arbitrary object using an image which is utilized in detecting changes in objects whose image characteristics change with time, like the wavelength characteristics with respect to a multispectral image, or relaxation times with respect to an NMR image.
Conventional change detection methods that utilize an image are limited to detection of changes on the basis of detecting the magnitude of change in spectral (wavelength or spectrum) vectors of two multitemporal images, and do not involve the detection of the direction of the change that takes place in such spectral vectors. Such detection methods have, for example, been proposed in "Change Detection of Land Coverage Using Landsat MSS Image" by Ioka et al which are on page 1280 to 1290 of the Proceedings of the 31st Japanese Conference of the Information Processing Society, "Manual of Remote Sensing", 2nd edition, 1983 from page 1612 to page 1602, and "Image Processing and Analysis", Kyoritsu Shuppan, 1981 from page 166 to page 184.
The conventional techniques do not take into consideration the wavelength characteristics which are specific to an object or data on the shape of the object, and suffer from poor detection accuracy when detecting changes in specific substances from time series image data.